To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.